AI War:3.060 Release

-Cross Planet Attacks now scale less severely with number of human players (multiplier is 1 + 0.33 for each additional player now instead of just the number of players).

AI Updates

-Anti-starship arachnids were spawning in response to minor human player starship presence, now the chance of the spawns is proportional to the intensity of the starship presence.

-Added support for removing individual AI types from consideration for random selection by placing disabledaitypes.txt file in your exe's directory (just like altplanetnames.txt) with a line for each AIType code to disable.

-AI Progress Floor calculations now extended to 300 Floor at 1450+ total progress (previously only went up to 100 floor at 450+ progress.

-AI floor calculation is now more granular, increasing floor by 1 per 5 total progress instead of 10 per 50 progress.

-Fixed a longstanding bug with cross-planet attacks (CPAs). Basically, a CPA is always uses ships that are the same level as the current tech level of the AI, but it won't use ships from any planets that have significant player presence on them. And if there were too few ships—well, too bad, the CPA would just be undersized. Now the game will go back for subsequent passes at higher tech levels to fill out the full roster of the CPA. So if you've been playing a particularly long game and all the planets have been upgraded to Mark IV simply because of densityof the ships (this would be 30+ hours of gametime, usually), then you're in for much more wicked CPAs than before, even if your AIP is low.

Performance Improvements

-When there are more than 100 "fuzzy lines" being drawn on the screen (as with tractor beams, etc), the game now switches to a lower-fidelity mode for those lines until fewer of them are being drawn. This helps performance quite a lot during large battles that include many tractor beams.

-Previously, there was a bug with the basic tutorials stuttering. Fixed.

-New music streaming code should do a better job under high latency conditions on some audio drivers.

-The rendering of many attack ranges has now become a bit more efficient.

-Added interface option "Icon Grouping Distance" which, if enabled (as it now is by default), groups far-zoom icons together to save rendering time. At the default setting, this makes render performance approximately doubled when zoomed out on a planet with a few thousand ships or more on it.

-GameCommand and AICommand objects now pooled for some performance boost.

-Several performance improvements have been made to how very large battles (more than a few thousand ships at a time) work. In general, this about triples performance when there are more than 2000 ships on each of two opposing sides on a planet. On smaller battles the effect is somewhat less striking, but still really significant.

-The game no longer checks for jpg versions of missing pngs, which makes it load faster.

-All of the various error files are now cleared at the start of every run of the program, preventing those files from getting too huge and causing game slowdowns because of missing images or whatever other cosmetic issues.

-Ships that are placed into cold storage are no longer removed and re-added to their planet's secondary rollups (they are just kept in those rollups the entire time). This removes the lag at the start of games from ships going into cold storage, as well as about all of the lag when ships are coming into and out of planets that are in cold storage. This makes transports that are traveling through many large planets that are in cold storage no longer cause the game to repeatedly hitch for about 2 seconds every time they enter or leave the planets of that sort, while still keeping practically all the benefits of cold storage itself.

-More targeting performance improvements have been made, and the FRD logic for ships has also been improved.

-Previously, free-roaming defender mode (which all minor factions use) could really slow down battles because of the extra compuation involved. Ships now weight frd computation as a higher issue, thus causing them to appropriately slow their target acquisition based on that to thus avoid such slowdown. This makes it far more feasible (if still inadvisable) to use frd mode on enemy planets, and also makes it so that minor factions don't slow down the game as they could before.

-Ships are now put into cold storage as part of the sync process, which takes extra time but prevents lag at the start of the game (aside from the lag of transferring data to the AI thread). Additionally, it now shows a status counter as part of the "Linking FG Objects" part of the sync, to make it clear what progress is being made during that period.

-Putting AI Ships into cold storage, and loading savegames with large numbers of AI ships in general, is now faster.

-Fixed a slowdown when playing against tag teamer AI types in particular when its ships were on player planets, but also when attacking command stations of AI players in general.

-Added system for aggregate targeting, if a ship is near enough to a ship of the same type that is owned by the same player and has already computed its target list, it just uses that list instead of computing its own. Currently this is used mainly to speed up the rate at which large groups of ships get their target lists (particularly noticeable on loading a game), but we could shift this to a cpu savings if it seems necessary.

Interface / Other Graphical Improvements

-The game now plays the buzz sound effect when a ship cannot be scrapped.

-The modeless message boxes are now larger, to make sure all text is always able to fit with the larger font that is now present.

-In addition to drawing ship-to-ship lines, munitions boosting is now indicated by ships having a pink hue to them when you are zoomed far in on them, and shield boosting is now indicated by ships having a light green hue to them when you are zoomed far in. There is now an option to turn off the munitions/shield lines in the settings window, since in extreme cases that could adversely affect performance.

-Alt-clicking ships in the planetary summary now deselects them.

-New interface feature: shift-left-clicking an item from the popup lists from the tabs at the bottom of the screen will now attempt to toggle it's paused state. This works for all of the ships that actually pauseable (i.e. not command stations or colony ships) but should work for the others just fine (including the low-power-mode tab for taking items off that list).

-Added J+right-click combination for new "formation-move" order that maintains each ship in the selection's relative offset from their weighted center.

-Added ;+right-click as basic "arc move" function: select ships, ;+right-click-and-hold the center of the desired circle, continue holding ; and right-mouse-button while moving the cursor to a point the desired radius away (it will show a line), then release to give the selected ships the order to position themselves in the designated circle.

-Added "Stay with MRS" control node that makes ships repaired by your multi-repair ships stay with the MRS unit rather than returning to their previous location.

-Added basic middle-mouse-click-and-drag panning.

-Added shift+middle-mouse-click-and-move to simulate the moving the cursor to the current point on the minimap, clicking left-mouse, and moving around.

-The "I" (incoming waves) overlay for the galaxy map now shows a timer on each planet with an incoming wave. representing time-to-arrival for the earliest wave that will hit that planet.

-Added "Don't Overwrite Previous Autosaves" checkbox to Settings -> Game menu. With this option checked, autosave file names will use the format Autosave_YYYY_MM_DD_hh_mm_ss.sav and thus will not overwrite each other (unless you somehow trigger multiple autosaves in the same second).

-Galaxy View Find Mode now displays the number of matching ships currently in transports in parentheses next to the normal counts.

-Added new control node that "Makes engineers prefer to assist non-mobile-military ships so they don't get bogged down repairing your fleets."

-Solving one of the more annoying pockets of micromanagement of the game, manufactories now auto-optimize their on/off states to keep resources flows as positive as possible (assuming there is enough free energy to turn them on).

-A new control node has been added to disable the new auto-management of manufactories, so that players can continue to manually manage them as before

-Added in-game screenshot key (F12), images are saved as .png files to the Screenshots directory under the local application data directory (so it's a sibling directory to the Saves directory).

-When hovering the selection box over ships, the game now only shows military units in the main count, and shows non-military units parenthetically after that.

-Previously, ships that were being transported would show up in the count of the quick buttons at the bottom of the screen, but not directly in the list itself. Now they show up as normal in the quick button lists of ships, with a flag of "Transported" behind them.

-Added "Non-Sniper Focus Fire" control node that makes non-sniper units use an alternate autotargetting behavior to focus on maximizing rapid enemy casualties. This behavior was developed for sniper units, so use with caution.

New Ships

-Four new space tugs have been added: One for picking up starships with less than 100% health remaining, and three for picking up ships with varying degrees of engine damage (they ignore ships without engine damage).

-New Riot Starship MkI added to the starship constructor (requires tech to unlock). This is a customizable modular ship, which is also a new feature in general.

-Added Riot Control Starship MkII and MkIII and associated modules.

Ship Logic Updates

-Previously, permamines were autotargeted by player ships to great disaster. Now, any ships with >= 2 billion health are automatically direct-only targets.

-Instead of patrolling at random, patrolling ships will now patrol between the guard posts on a planet if there are at least two such guard posts. If there are not, then they will patrol at random.

-Previously, ships with shorter range could not attack force fields that had a radius greater than their range unless they were targeting some ship under the force field. Fixed so that now there is always at least a 5% chance that they will be able to hit such ships.

-Previously, Zenith Trade Ships would immediately exit dead-end worlds. Now they will first travel to the command station and back on the world before leaving.

-Remains Rebuilders now have a delay before they will start rebuilding. For players, that delay is a simple 3 seconds, but for the AI that delay is 2 minutes. This makes the burden of cleanup drones significantly less onerous.

-All non-melee ships in the game now have an extra 2,000 range. This solves many of the targeting issues for fighters in attack-move stance, etc, and provides for a better large-battle experience in general.

-Cleanup Drones are now able to dismantle enemy mines (including permamines) on allied planets.

-Units that are hit by translocation shots are no longer translocated if they are already held by a tractor beam.

-Since ships immune to their own damage types are now effectively immune to reflected shots, their autotargetting will now not be prejudiced towards saving mirrors for last (same with ships otherwise immune to reflected shots).

-Large ships (radius >= 256) are now immune to translocation.

-The calculation of "which forcefield is protecting me" for each ship is now much more likely to pick the "outer" forcefield of a set of forcefields where one completely encapsulates another. This makes incoming fire less likely to visually "penetrate" the outer field to damage the inner. Will not do much better in cases where the forcefields overlap but one is not contained within the other.

-Previously if AI ship was regenerated (e.g. by a regenerator train) it was being regen'd free-to-hunt-human-players even if killed by a minor faction ship (e.g. a Devourer) in the complete absence of human player ships. Fixed so that there needs to be at least one human player ship on the planet for the freeing to take place.

-Previously if an AI ship was chasing a minor faction ship and moved beyond a certain distance from its guard poing, it would be freed to hunt the human players. Fixed to not be thus freed unless there is at least one human player ship on the planet.

-When a ship module is destroyed the parent ship automatically queues a replacement (assuming a conflicting order hasn't already been queued).

-Modified the "don't chase teleporting units" code to prevent a problem causing human player ships in FRD mode to do nothing because they were constantly picking a teleporting target and dropping it again.

-Modified evade-at-wormhole-end logic so that ONLY the following ships use this behavior: Scout I-IV, Scout Starship.

-Cloaking boosters now boost ships not in low-power-mode before ships in low-power-mode.

-New rule in hit chance calculation: if the defender is held in a tractor beam and the defender is within the attacker's normal range, the attacker's minimum hit chance is 5%.

-Ships that are within the normal attack range of enemy ships are now given a 1% chance of hitting the enemy ship, whereas previously they could have a 0% hit chance if the enemy ship had shields that were too high. This prevents confusion when turrets, etc, just sit there stupidly when a highly-shielded target is in their outer range, but not in their effective range.

-Modified autotargetting-throttling to be quicker about digging through a massive line of ships waiting for autotargetting (mainly when just loading a game with tons of ships fighting) to avoid large groups of ships sitting there doing nothing for minutes.

-Previously, area of effect shots could hit cloaked ships, which caused numerous problems with scouts and other units being hit when they seemingly should not have been. This has been changed so that cloaking now provides immunity from being hit by area of effect attacks.

-Autotargeting has been much improved in terms of better accounting for targets that are killed or recloaked, which is especially notable for FRD mode but also relevant in general for all battles. It makes ships act with more purpose, and avoid lulls where they were just sitting around.

Balance Updates

-The repair range of mobile repair stations is now up to 3000 from 1000, but they can now only repair a maximum of 50 ships at once.

-Anti-Starship Arachnids will now do a much better job of preferring to shoot at starships.

-Dyson Gatlings now have 10x more health.

-The force field radius, and the health, of force field bearers has been increased.

-Cursed Golems now lose health half as fast as they previously did.

-Electric Shuttles now have a smaller maximum damage modifier against any enemy ships.

-Dyson Gatlings are now unable to hit core ships.

-Rebel Colonies will no longer spawn on AI planets that have an original tech level greater than II.

-Scouts and scout starships are now immune to force fields to prevent them from ever getting stuck on enemy planets while traveling automatically.

-The cost of resistance ships has been increased by 33%, but rebelling human colonies now produce +55 metal and crystal per second. This makes capturing multiple rebel colonies valuable.

-Ships are no longer able to be put inside Hive Golems as a transport; hive golems only transport the wasps that they create themselves. This also fixes an issue with engineers being unable to repair hive golems.

-Engineers and Mobile Repair Stations no longer require supply to function. This lets them work on enemy planets to support longer-range raids if players desire (thus letting no-engine ships be healed in those circumstances), and it also allows players to repair broken golems on nuked planets, and other similar circumstances.

-Marauders and human resistance fighters will now have half as many ships as before.

-Armored and Lightning Warheads no longer hurt allied ships when they go off, and now properly hit enemy command stations and similar.

-Human players must now have at least 100 military ships on an AI planet for the resistance fighters to join in.

-Marauders and resistance fighers were starting way too far out in the middle of nowhere. Changed so that they start around 10x closer now.

-Vampires, Cutlasses, and Wasps now have 2,000 more shields each.

-All of the weapons have been removed from the cloaker starships, as this would cause them to blow their own cover and was fairly pointless for them to have, anyway.

-Cleanup Drones now work half as quickly as before. With all the other recent shifts, they were otherwise becoming too powerful when used alone or in pairs.

-Mobile Repair Stations now have infinite engine health, since there is no way for their engine health to be regained.

-Engineers, cleanup drones, remains rebuilders, mobile builders, mobile repair stations, and space tugs are all now able to pass through enemy force fields. This prevents them from ever getting stuck while trying to do their work.

-On spokes maps only AI planets with >= 5 wormholes get Core Forcefields (previously every single AI planet got one on those maps).

-Mines no longer have engine damage strength (used to have 300, though it didn't seem to be working, and it was decided they shouldn't do engine damage anyway).

-Transports were still evading after exiting a wormhole (like scouts), despite the change where a dying transport's passengers are safely dumped rather than destroyed immediately. Changed to not use the scout behavior.

-Added player-planet-wide delay between electric shuttle attacks (so each player can have a shuttle fire every 15 turns or whatever it is).

-Counter turrets (-sniper,-darkMatter,-missiles) now have increased range and much increased health. -darkMatter and -missiles have lowered knowledge cost.

-Lowered SelfBuildTime of several units sold through Zenith Trader, as they were so large (20000 in one case) that they were causing precision errors in determining the per-turn metal/crystal cost of self-construction, leading to ships like the Zenith Power Generator consuming a much lower rate for 95% of the build time and then spiking at the end to make up the difference.

-Increased repair costs of units sold through Zenith Trader.

-The auspicious Zenith Trader now offers a fine selection of Counter Spy units (well, only one ship type, but you know).

-AI viral shredders now only have a 10% chance of replicating when they amass enough build points to replicate.

-Reduced Electric Shuttle attack power to 50% of what it was in 3.0 (so 200,600,1000,1500)

-Reduced Electric Shuttle aoe-delay from 15 to 12 to speed up the rolling thunder a bit

-Electric Shuttles now do 30% of normal damage against Teleport Raiders (who they used to eat alive)

-Made it so that Interplanetary Munitions Boosters will not be placed on or adjaent to AI homeworlds.

-Made it so that Dyson Sphere Golems will not be placed on AI homeworlds (but can still be adjacent).

-Turret and mine remains, as well as mines themselves, are now blind so as not to provide inappropriate scout intel by existing on enemy planets.

-Changed Electric Shuttle damage against tele-raiders from 30% of normal to 50%

-There is now a maximum of 4 advanced factories created during map generation.

-Scouts and scout starships are now immune to area of effect attacks.

-Tripled energy cost of all space planes, along with doubling their metal/crystal costs.

-Space plane cap multiplier changed from 2.5 to 1.75.

-Cleanup drones are now immune to tractor beams and aoe damage.

-Sentinel Frigate rebalance: towards usefulness to the player and somewhat less to the AI: tripled damage, recharge time from 100 to 80, 40% cluster penalty to 45%, attack power floor from 6% to 2%

-Bulletproof Fighter rebalance: increased health to 80% of fighters, added minHitPercent of 15 (fighters have 30), increased attack to halfway between where they are now (200 for MkI) and fighters (300 for MkI).

-Zenith Viral Shredder replication is now more complex:
-- replication requires that the shredder have at least a certain health percent (20% for MkI)
-- replication results in the shredder and the new shredder having a certain percent of the old shredder's health (75% for MkI)
-- replication cost scales up with the number of that ship type on the planet in excess of the normal ship cap for that type.

-Missile frigates bonus against anti-starship arachnids (and other spider types) increased from 3x to 6x (for reference, their bonus against fighters is 10x).

-Munitions Boosts no longer stack, the highest available to a given ship is used.

-Munitions Boosts are now more incremental instead of 100%, 200%, etc.

-Munitions Booster speed from 12 to 24 (will almost certainly nerf this back down).

-Bulletproof fighter stats adjusted to be more unique from the fighter.

-Devourer Golem now completely unable to damage guard posts and command stations, in order to prevent them from freeing high mark AI ships to attack the player in the first 10 minutes. Same applied to Dyson Gatlings, Marauders, and Resistance Fighters (this is not ideal as we would like gatlings/marauders to be able to blow up player command stations, so may revisit this).

-Previously non-cold-storage lighting turrets would fire even if only fully cloaked enemy ships were present. Fixed so that they will not fire unless there is some legitimate target provoking them.

-Force fields are now immune to translocation.

-Added some autotargetting optimizations for Riot Control Starships to disable the engines of as many enemy ships as possible. Also applied same logic to spiders and spider turrets.

-Previously SpiderIVs did the same engine damage as SpiderIIIs despite having a much lower cap, whereas SpiderIIIs had a significant better engine damage than SpiderIIs (and IIs than Is), so changed SpiderIVs to fire 3 shots instead of 1, maintaining a decent progression of effectiveness. To compensate a bit, SpiderIV energy cost doubled from 30 to 60.

-All of the various types of astro trains are now unable to be repaired. This helps to mitigate their effects at least a tiny bit over the course of longer games. They also no longer have bonuses against engineers.

-Fortresses are now immune to Devourer golems. Golems more hungry as a result.

-Changed Impulse Reaction Emitter shots to have a maximum multiplier of 2500 (for ships that use 25,000 or more energy) so that they aren't so incredibly powerful against golems (where they could normally get a multiplier of 40,000+).

-The move speeds of all the scouts, and the scout starship, have all been doubled to counter the effects of the much-larger tachyon beams that are now on planets.

-Warp gates now only cost 5 AI Progress to destroy, while command stations now cost 15. Thus making it cheaper to gate-raid, but the same price to take a new planet.

-Alarm posts, Raid Engines, and Black Hole machines now increase the AI Progress by half as much as before when they die.

-Made Astro Trains immune to paralysis attacks.

-Previously cluster attack penalties were more harsh than intended, changed to a more gradual (but increasing) rate of decline.

-Transports now move vastly faster, have almost doubled shields, have 10x more health, and cost 2x as much crystal.

-Ships with attack bonuses against all other starships now have similar bonuses against experimental starships (the beam and bird starships).

-Devourer Golems now have 9x as much health as before.

-Bombers now do only 3/4 their prior damage to force fields and heavy defenses (fortresses, etc).

-Dreadnoughts now only do about 2/3 their prior damage to heavy defenses, teleport battle stations, and zenith bombardments.

-Infiltrators now have much lower bonuses against those ships they specialize against, with the largest drop being against heavy defenses and force fields.

-Eyebots now do half their prior bonus against heavy defenses, force fields, scouts, and engineers.

-Zenith Electric Bombers now have much lower damage bonuses against tanks, force fields, and heavy defenses.

-Zenith Chameleons now have halved damage bonuses against all ships, except for resource ships, which they now have a doubled bonus against.

-Astro Train Stations now only have 5/8 as much health as before.

-Tachyon Drones and Decloakers no longer require supply.

Misc Changes

-The game now auto-corrects for AI ships that were accidentally placed on top of one another in past versions of the game, though it doesn't touch the placement of player ships.

-AI immobile ships are now unable to be placed directly on top of wormholes.

-The logic for when harvesters are auto-created by command stations has been improved so that if any non-mine military units of the enemy are present, it will not auto-create them.

-The wording for when ships do not have supply has been improved so as to be more clear when supply is blocked for some reason other than distance from allied planets.

-Previously, if the low-energy text was being shown over a ship, then no other hover text (such as knowledge counts on science labs) was shown. Changed so that it now shows both.

-Remains are now omitted from the ship icon guide (F1), as they have no useful traits to show and took up too much vertical space on hover.

-Sizing updates have been made to many of the menu panels and windows to make them more localization-friendly.

-The resource bar at the top of the screen now sizes itself in a more dynamic way, so that it is more localization-friendly.

-It is no longer possible for players to manually attack remains, as that often led to accidental pointless clicks during the middle of battle.

-Individual waves are now capped at a map of 2,000 AI units. Since the AI can send up to two waves per human player, this can still be an enormous number of ships overall if players have a huge number of wave-multiplying assets on a target planet.

-If the game is for whatever reason unable to load settings.dat, it now tries to load settings.bak. If it fails loading that as well, then it will instead launch with an empty settings file. Previously, the game would just crash in these cases.

-DNS hostnames can now be entered into the direct connect server box, whereas previously it would only allow IP Addresses.

-Changes have been made to auto-wrap text in foreign languages, and to correct localization artifacts on game load, thus optimizing the look of the game in more localizations.

-Made Core Warhead Interceptor much lower priority target for AI.

-Modified maximum value of "Show Icons At" slider on Settings -> Interface menu from 800 to 100; as any value about 97 or so basically means "never show icons". (if you have a setting higher than 100 it will be set to 100 when you open the settings screen to prevent a crash).

-Cluster attack bonus ability description in ship info now shows the third decimal place since it was misleading to show autocannon minipod mk2s as only have 0.02% bonus per ship when it is really 0.025%.

-Added sanity check to prevent the AI from generating a ship on a planet that already has at least 6000 AI units.

-Amended perma-mine description to note to clarify that Cleanup drones can only remove them once you own the planet.

-Previously, if an expansion folder existed, it would treat the expansion as installed. This could lead to problems with the beta for people without the real expansion installed. Changed so that it now only treats an expansion as installed if the Version.txt file exists inside the expansion folder.

-Changed negative shield boost text to be a bit clearer that it is a negative modifier.

-A stop command to a ship now also counts as a stop command to each of its modules (for the purpose of clearing preferred targets, for example).

-Rally posts no longer cost knowledge.

-Control nodes can no longer be paused.

-Made the ControlNodeFRDLimitedTo80000 node apply to non-military ships as well.

-Ships over a certain cost threshold (500,000 right now, for either metal or crystal) now use an alternate build-increment timing so they only update every game-second instead of every cycle (20 cycles a game-second). This should help prevent cost-rate spikes towards the end of building a Zenith Power Generator, for example.

-Made Riot Control Starship forcefield module center on the ship instead of stick to the normal module attachment point.

-Made Riot Control Starship module construction non-assistable if the ship has been damaged in the past few seconds (same threshold as repairs).

-The Delete button on the Save and Load screens were previously showing up with gray text, which made them look disabled when they are not. Changed to simply show these as white.

-Relaxed "am I out of range" checks on shots that were causing them to disappear mysteriously in a lot of cases (particularly involving decoys).

-Clarified Devourer Golem description to note that they also eat scouts despite scouts not having attack power (they are mobile military despite this).

-Previously, AI ships could be set free by chasing scouts too far away from their guard posts, which could lead to early waves of higher-level ships if players were unlucky in their scouting. This was most noticeable against the Tag Teamer AI type. Resolved.

-Auto-build-harvester behavior is now disabled for tutorials 1 and 2, to let players learn how to manage this on their own.

-Changed name of "Remains Rebuilders" unit to "Remains Rebuilder".

-Modular ships (just the Riots, right now) now properly flag their build queues as non-assistable when they don't contain any queue items that are currently buildable (i.e. queued modules with no hardpoint to fit on).

-Super Terminals added to the list of units that absolutely, positively, must not move when the game is loaded (Exo-wormholes are the other such unit).

-More localization-related changes.

-Attrition Emitters are no longer put in cold storage.

-Transport boarding distance is now considerably more forgiving to teleporting units (previously it was very difficult to load a teleporting unit into a moving transport).

-The way that line breaks are handled for the Strong/Weak data is now much improved so that it no longer leads to odd wrapping. This is particularly notable in non-English versions of the game.

-Riot Control Starship's module buy menu now color coded by hardpoint type to make somewhat clearer which modules "compete" with each other for space.

-The little starship icon underneath planets on the galaxy map is no longer used, now it just shows the regular ship icon always.

-All forcefield creating units are now listed as immune to tractor beams (anything under a forcefield is already immune to tractors, but it doesn't show in the tooltip).

-AI self-building units now temporarily suspend construction if damaged, to make it less likely that overkill-prevention will result in the AI ship not being destroyed. This construction-suspension rule does not currently apply to non-AI ships.

NEW ART

-Added new Riot Control Starship graphics by I-KP.

-Added ship-based forcefield graphic from I-KP, and it is used for the forcefield generator module that can be mounted on the Riot Control Starship.

-A new lightning sprite by I-KP has replaced the old one, making for a nicer look as well as making it easier to see the source of lightning bursts.

-Previously, the multi-repairs of fortresses to other units were not working correctly. Fixed.

-The collision-detection issues with objects in cold storage have now been fully resolved; objects now collide with objects in cold storage as if they were not.

-Leech Starships were previously not counting as starships. Fixed.

-The logic for resistance fighters spawning was incorrect, and they never were. They will actually start showing up now.

-Previously, the "niche text" on icons was not being shown in ship placement mode until the ship was actually placed. Fixed.

-Previously, lightning warheads and other explosion-type units (warheads, autobombs, etc) were detonating too early against very large structures. Fixed.

-Lack of metal or crystal no longer prevents allies from having their ships be assisted in self-construction or queue-construction.

-Previously, command station home cores were not being created for a new player to a game until they were given at least one other ship from another player. Fixed.

-Previously, some listbox popups could hang off the bottom of the screen. Fixed.

-Previously, the Auto AI Progress values were not being set properly from the game lobby. Fixed.

-Previously it was possible for expansion minor factions to be enabled in non-expansion games. Fixed.

-Previously, there were some glitches with the health of very high-health ships such as PermaMines, which was causing them to be targetable when they should not have been, and autoattacked in FRD mode, etc. Fixed.

-Previously, using shift+right click to deselect groups of units from the unit type selection box was not working properly. Fixed.

-Space tugs were not visually showing up correctly in the build queue. Fixed.

-When hovering over a marauder with your units selected, it was previously not giving targeting info. Fixed.

-Fixed an issue with engineer beams flashing green right at the start when they are assigned to a unit they cannot actually assist at the moment.

-Previously, engineers were charging players for repairing space docks that they were assisting, even if they were not doing actual repairs. Fixed.

-Fixed a bug that could lead to indecisive AI units if they were simultaneously trying to escape and attack.

-Previously, there was a bug where steam achievements would reactivate on every game load. Fixed.

-The text in the tutorials window was being cut off in recent versions. Fixed.

-Command Stations will now only autobuild ships at planets that have supply.

-Fixed a collision issue that could previously cause allied ships to dance around instead of stopping in rare cases.

-Previously, the +/- buttons would not always respond to being pressed. Fixed.

-Previously, tachyon warheads were enabled when cloaking was disabled. Fixed.

-Previously, there was an issue with Zenith Traders not always going through wormholes correctly when a player planet was on the other side. Fixed.

-Previously, cloaked ships that were revealed by a tachyon beam could not be manually targeted by player ships. Fixed.

-Fixed a bug relating to enemy units turning into threat via chasing marauders and other minor faction ships. This was most noticeable with core ships chasing devourer golems.

-Experimental starships (warbirds, beams) were not being treated as starships, fixed (this also fixes the cannot-put-them-in-low-power-mode problem).

-Planetary shield inhibitors (and similar) were having full effect even while still under construction, fixed to not "activate" until construction is complete.

-AI combat ship tactics are now much less likely to switch between high-priority (irreplaceable) targets when they have a significant advantage on a planet.

-Fixed AI ships stopping and starting a lot during movement towards a high-priority target (e.g. command station) out of its effective range.

-Fixed bug where ships put into frd by auto-frd control node were not returning to their original point after doing something on frd (like an engineer auto-assisting something).

-Previously, a bug was preventing players with greater than version 3.0 of the game from installing the expansion through the Arcen updater. Fixed.

-Fixed bugs preventing the AI taunt conditions from ever being true.

-Fixed a bug where very long range ships (like Zenith Bombard; not snipers or other infinite-range ones since those are handled differently) were not auto-firing at all due to an overflow calculating their guard range.

-Fixed a bug where "pause all" was not properly causing the game to realize that the paused constructors were not assistable, so frd engineers would sometimes waste time assisting them.

-Fixed bug where you could get an achievement from playing a game started in someone else's profile.

-Fixed bug where group-moving through a wormhole to a planet with a rally post was causing the ships to break out of group-move and travel full speed.

-Fixed bug where a unit assisting an allied constructor could not assist if the allied constructor's player did not have sufficient resources.

-Fixed bug where an engineer that had previously failed to assist (due to a space dock queue running out or some such) would draw a red fuzzy line instead of a green fuzzy line when repairing a ship, even though it was successfully repairing the target.

-Fixed bug where giving an attack order during execution of a move order would cause a complete stop before re-accelerating (move during move just changed direction, no slowdown).

-Fixed bug where auto-frd node was overwriting AttackMovePoint with LocationCenter even when AttackMovePoint was not empty.

-Previously, if a player tried to connect to a game with the same name as the game host, it was failing silently instead of giving them the appropriate duplicate player message. Fixed.

-Ships immune to black hole machines were not saying so on the tooltip, fixed.

-AI should no longer taunt player for scrapping a command station.

-Fixed a bug where joining a multiplayer game as a client, quitting, and loading another game for single-player play would leave you stuck "Waiting for players".

-Fixed "Cloaked Enemey Ship" typo.

-Previously ships that were self-built that could unload passengers could not have their construction paused because the Unload button was being drawn on top of the pause button, fixed.

-Previously ships in FRD would sometimes ignore distant ships based on guard radius, fixed to not regard guard radius in FRD.

-Previously when loading a save (generally an autosave) that was created on the exact same Game Second as an auto AI progress increase, it would apply the auto increase again despite it having also been applied before the save was created. Fixed to remember the last auto increment Game Second and not increment again until enough additional seconds have passed.

-Previously exo-wormholes were being treated as AI units during loading of a game, which could cause them to fail a collision check against other stationary objects and move out of the way, resulting in the exo-wormhole not being in the same place after loading a game. Fixed to not consider collision-moving for exo-wormholes.

-Previously ships that were able to fire through forcefields were completely unable to fire at targets protected by a decoy drone AND completely unable to fire at the drone (other ships could at least shoot the drone). Fixed so that ships able to fire through forcefields are able to fire at ships protected by a decoy drone as if the drone were not there.

-Fixed a bug that could cause the load/save screen to take over a minute to come up in some circumstances.

-Fixed an inaccuracy and a typo in the Interplanetary Munitions Booster description.

-Updated descriptions for Remains objects to not wrap in odd places.

-Previously, the game would crash if it was missing any of the images used by its GDI components. Fixed.

-Fixed the issue with the raid and leech starship mark levels being visually offset.

-Previously units with IsScout set were having a lot of orders (FRD, etc) cleared when loading a game, fixed to not reset these.

-Fixed Co-processor description line breaks to display better.

-Previously if an object was somehow created on the exact center of the planet (coordinates 0,0) it would behave very oddly (notably most shots would not progress towards them). This typically only happened with cheat-created ships. Fixed to make sure that objects are never added directly on 0,0.

-Previously ships towed through a wormhole were switching planets without changing location coordinates, resulting in very odd positions and very long tractor beams. Fixed to set the location of the towed ship to the location of the towing ship after switching planets.

-Previously clicking the "reset all queues" button with some currently self-building units would scrap the self-building units. Fixed so that reset does nothing to units still self-building.

-Overhauled cursor position detection to properly account for the window toolbar (if enabled) and window positions other than screen coordinate (0,0).

-Previously Marauder Buzz Bombs were considering human ships as friendly when exploding (and thus not damaging them), fixed to consider them as enemy in that case.

-Previously, if an overly long name was entered for the profile, it would not be visible in the main menu. Fixed.

-Previously ships reduced to very low percentages of engine health (particularly those like dreadnoughts with low normal speeds) could sometimes fail to move despite having an effective speed of 1. Fixed to be able to move at the slowest possible speed in those cases, even if it's more than they deserve.

-Previously AI engineers in FRD mode could get into a cycle of moving to a nearby guard post and then back to their FRD anchor point over and over again. Fixed to re-anchor their FRD point to the guard post.

-Fixed Tutorial 3 to prevent AI ships from entering FRD mode and thus attacking human player ships when the instructions specifically state that this will not happen.

-Previously cleanup drones could start cleaning up permamines when the human player had begun construction of a command station on the planet. Fixed to not allow the cleanup drones to start cleaning up permamines until the command station is complete.

-Previously it was possible in very rare cases for ships to get "stuck" on the edge of a hostile strong forcefield. Fixed to use more exact distance checking in case of possible collision to check for a real collision.

-Previously if a scrolling key (up/down/left/right) was pressed while clicking on the scores screen, after the scores screen was closed the game would still think the scrolling key was pressed (thus leaving the screen scrolling until the same key was pressed and released). Fixed to clear the pressed-ness of those keys when closing the scores screen.

-Fixed a bug where AI taunts were ignoring the "Disable Sound" setting.

-Previously, when a raid engine finished counting down on a planet with no command station, it would cause the game to crash.

-Fixed some inaccuracies/omissions in Riot module descriptions.

CHANGES TO PAST PRERELEASES

=

SPECIAL THANKS

-Thanks to Hans-Martin Portmann for suggesting the fuzzy line performance improvement, from suggesting the removal of munitions boosting lines, for reporting that shield boosters could affect minor factions, for reporting the issue with fortress repairs, for suggesting the health boost to dyson gatlings, for suggesting that multiple rebel colonies still provide some benefit to the players, for the better-looking small shot effect.

-Thanks to Blahness for suggesting the increase in MRS range, for reporting that the increase to MRS range didn't actually work the first time, and for suggesting the starship tug 100.

-Thanks to kjara for suggesting the engine tugs, for reporting that anti-starship arachnids were not targeting starships with preference, for suggesting the improvement to patrols, for reporting that marauders were getting the player speed boost, for reporting the issue with marauders spawning way too far out on enemy planets, for reporting the issue with targeting issue not appearing when hovering over marauders, for suggesting the shield boost to melee ships, for reporting the issue with vertical space on the remains hover in the F1 windows, for suggesting that transports no longer use the scout-evade behavior after exiting wormhole, for reporting that it was possible to detect fully cloaked enemy ships in Icon Grouping rendering mode, for pointing out that zenith mirrors do really poorly under sniper fire, for reporting that zenith-mirror-reflected shots were not respecting immunity, for noting that the devourer description didn't clearly state that it eats scouts, for reporting that the tooltip for Zenith Paralyzers was always saying x0, for reporting that giving an attack order during execution of a move order would cause a complete stop before re-accelerating, for reporting that devourers were devouring inordinate numbers of special forces ships, for suggesting the change to the AIP costs of warp gates and command stations, for reporting that teleporting units had a very hard time boarding moving transports.

-Thanks to Oewyn for reporting the bug with gifting reactors, for reporting the issue with planetary cloakers in cold storage, for reporting the lack of resistance fighters, for reporting the issue with engineers charging players for repairs of fully-healed docks, for pointing out that mine remains were still targetable, for suggesting buffs for counter-turrets, for pointing out that AI Taunts were never playing, for pointing out that core warhead interceptors were much too highly prioritized as a target by the AI, for reporting that a unit assisting an allied constructor could not assist if the allied constructor's player did not have sufficient resources, for reporting and providing a save to demonstrate the occasional unwillingness of ships to shoot at secondary targets while their primary target was out of range, for suggesting that the ControlNodeFRDLimitedTo80000 apply to non-military ships too, for noting that electric shuttles were pretty brutal and for their save file and suggestions on fixing this, for reporting that attrition emitters were not functioning in cold storage, for reporting that experimental starships didn't have the expected starship weaknesses.

-Thanks to SNAFU for reporting the issue with ships autoattacking permamines.

-Thanks to RCIX for reporting the turret stacking, for reporting the persistence of the dancing guards issue, for suggesting the improvements to the force field bearers, for suggesting the reduction in cursed golem health drain rate, for suggesting the change to how rebel colonies spawn, for suggesting the change to the cloaker starships, for suggesting a cap on the number of ships an MRS can repair simultaneously, for suggesting an option for MRS-repaired ships staying with the MRS rather than returning to their previous location, for reporting that enemy ships were sometimes still being drawn after the human players had lost visibility.

-Thanks to HellishFiend for reporting the issue with Zenith Trade Ships on dead-end worlds, for reporting the issue with positive handicaps affecting negative resource outflows, for reporting the issue with short-range ships targeting high-radius force fields, for reporting the issue with assisting allies failing when they have zero of a resource, for reporting the issue with engineers trying to teleport into enemy force fields, for reporting the omitted knowledge counts on science labs when there is low energy, for reporting the issue with translocators hitting ships that are held by tractor beams, for reporting the issue with Zenith Traders going through wormholes, for suggesting that cloaked ships in general not be immune to AOE damage, for reporting the oddly steep effect of attack cluster penalties, for reporting that Devourer Golems were indulging in ridiculous amounts of overkill, for reporting that ships were getting stuck on the edges of hostile forcefields.

-Thanks to Kalzarius for reporting the issue with area damage and direct-targeted enemy ships, for reporting the inability to repair hive golems, for reporting the issues with lightning warhead targeting, for providing the updated game music streaming code, for reporting the issue with the find listbox hanging off the bottom of the screen, for suggesting the larger stream buffer size for game music, and for reporting that lightning turrets were firing even when the only enemy ships in range were fully cloaked.

-Thanks to Velox for reporting the issue with engineers sticking to docks, for suggesting that the buzz sound effect play when ships cannot be scrapped, for helping diagnose the problem with permamines being autoattacked, for reporting the issue with harvesters rebuilding when enemy turrets were present, for reporting the issue with manually targeting ships revealed by a tachyon beam, and for reporting that engineers sometimes drew red lines instead of green when successfully repairing ships.

-Thanks to SpencerK and ownu for reporting the stuttering bug in the basic tutorials.

-Thanks to akronia for reporting the issue with the multi-planet warning text in the lobby being cut off, for reporting the issue with ship text on placement mode not showing up, for reporting that Dyson gatling reclamation led to weird behavior (they're not supposed to be reclaimable).

-Thanks to SkyWest for reporting the issue with leech starships not counting as starships.

-Thanks to Amonchakad for reporting the issue with scouts getting stuck on force fields, for reporting the broken Auto AI Progress settings.

-Thanks to Collic for suggesting that the munitions lines simply be an option to turn off.

-Thanks to arthurp for suggesting that alt-clicking items in the planetary summary should deselect them.

-Thanks to NahtanoJ88 for reporting the issue with command station home cores for new players.

-Thanks to Lars Bull for reporting the issue with minor factions from the expansion being able to be enabled in non-expansion games, for reporting the issue with shift+right clicking the selected units dropdown, for reporting the issue with the +/- key not always working, for reporting that starting a second instance of the game on a single-screen system causes a crash.

-Thanks to Anticept for reporting the issue with space tugs not showing up correctly in queues, for reporting the issue with mobile repair station engine health being unrepairable, and for reporting that pausing control nodes does not deactivate them.

-Thanks to carlosjuero for suggesting the change to make resistance fighters only spawn when there are a certain number of human ships at a planet, for suggesting automatic DNS resolution of host names for direct connect, and for the example code that worked very well.

-Thanks to TheDeadlyShoe for providing a save to show indecisive AI ships and for suggesting that astro trains be made immune to paralysis attacks.

-Thanks to intently for inspiring the ability to let cleanup drones remove mines on allied planets.

-Thanks to frags for reporting the issue with Steam achievements activating on every savegame load.

-Thanks to I-KP for reporting the issue with command stations still autobuilding when they have no supply, for reporting that fortress construction could not be paused, for contributing a lot sfx and graphics for the new Riot starship line, for suggesting a disabledaitypes.txt file to save GUI programming time on the disabling-individual-ai's feature, for pointing out that micro-ing ships to constantly fly over a mobile repair station was allowing the simultaneous repair of an arbitrary number of ships, for creating the new lightning sprite, for suggesting that Advanced Factories "fold out" rather than replicate on capture, for suggesting the engine-damage-floor concept, for suggesting revised preconfigurations for the Riot.

-Thanks to PLivesey for reporting the issue with "no supply" text being incorrect.

-Thanks to orzelek for reporting the collision issue that caused dancing allied ships, for reporting that the lobby was not retaining proper checked-ness of minor faction types, for reporting that engineers set to frd by the auto frd engineer control node were not returning to their original spot after doing something, for pointing out that modules should honor stop commands to the parent ship, for providing a save to investigate the mysterious-disappearing-shots problem, and for pointing out that translocation was working in some pretty absurd cases (fortresses, etc).

-Thanks to Thasero for reporting that warbird experimental starships can't be put in low-power mode, for reporting that the hover text of mines reported 300 engine damage strength but no such engine damage was observed in practice, for reporting that experimental starships (warbirds, beams) were not being treated as starships, for suggesting that munitions boosting ships have a cap on the number of ships they can simultaneously boost, for reporting that icon groups were disappearing if their top ship died, and for suggesting that Interplanetary Munitions Boosters not be placed adjacent to AI homeworlds and that Dyson Spheres not be placed on AI homeworlds.

-Thanks to PineappleSam for reporting the fact that tachyon warheads were enabled when cloaking was off.

-Thanks to Doddler for suggesting that remains not be manually attackable, for reporting AI ships stopping and starting a lot, for reporting the issue with scouts freeing guards when they should not, and for reprting that cleanup drones could start cleaning up permamines when the human player had begun construction of a command station on the planet instead of waiting for the station to complete.

-Thanks to Ruges for reporting that planetary shield inhibitors (and similar) were having full effect even while still under construction, for reporting that ion cannons were getting munitions-boosted, for reporting that raid starships were unable to fire at decoy-drone-protected ships or the drones themselves despite the fact that they should be able to ignore the drones altogether, and for reporting that it's possible to get over 7000 viral shredders of a given level by abusing the game horribly.

-Thanks to Johnthesavage for reporting that spokes maps had a core AI forcefield on every single AI planet.

-Thanks to vonduus for reporting indecisive ai behavior when multiple high priority targets were available, particularly when one started construction in the middle of the battle, and for reporting the out of memory exception that can come from Game Command pooling, for reporting the wrong mark level icon showing on the tachyon beam emitter.

-Thanks to Bobtree for reporting that lightning warheads can be munitions-boosted, for reporting that Z+X hotkey was showing ship ranges on planets where the players had no visibility.

-Thanks to billboo151 for reporting the issue with installing the expansion on certain versions of the game.

-Thanks to Unspoken for suggesting a way to ease toggling pause on energy reactors.

-Thanks to Ozymandiaz for reporting Zenith Power Generators (and similar) consuming extreme amounts of resources at the end of construction.

-Thanks to aZmoDen for reporting that Zenith Bombards were not auto-firing as they should.

-Thanks to Buttons840 for reporting that FRD engineers were sometimes distracted by constructors paused by "pause all" in a way that wasn't true of manually paused constructors, for reporting the issue with mine remains providing line of sight data, for reporting that fortresses lose their FRD status after a save, and for reporting that loading autosaves was sometimes resulting in additional AI progress.

-Thanks to Baka^Ni for pointing out the problems with a player unlocking achievements by playing a game started under another player's profile.

-Thanks to Goekhan for reporting that ships group-moving through a wormhole to a planet with a rally post were breaking out of group-move.

-Thanks to Florian for suggesting that the back-and-forth gifting of advanced factories in multiplayer games be made unnecessary.

-Thanks to Echo35 for pointing out that the icon draw distance slider pretty much meant "never draw icons" past about 1/16th up the slider.

-Thanks to Lancefighter for suggesting that scouts be immune to AOE damage.

-Thanks to Black for suggestions on initial rebalancing of space planes, for reporting that exo wormholes were moving between saves, and for suggestions on non-linear mechanics of viral shredder replication.

-Thanks to Malibu Stacey for pointing out the inaccuracy of the autocannon mk2 tooltip.

-Thanks to Venma for suggestions on making the middle-mouse click-and-drag pan more usable.

-Thanks to deMangler for providing a save to fix that stubborn bug with auto-frd-mobile-miltary control nodes overriding constructor gather points.

-Thanks to HitmanN for reporting that with Icon Grouping enemies remain on screen even when no player ships on a planet and for reporting that ships emerging from a wormhole were sometimes not being drawn until zooming in and back out, for pointing out that forcefield generating ships did not note in their tooltips that they are immune to tractors.

-Thanks to Fleet for reporting that FRD ships were sometimes ignoring distant ships, for reporting that the descriptions for remains and co-processors were wrapping in odd places, for pointing out that the effect text for shield inhibiting was unclear, for pointing out that the perma-mine description does not indicate that planet ownership is required for cleanup drones to clean them up, for reporting that ships etherjet-tractored through a wormhole were showing up at very odd positions, for reporting that reset was scrapping constructors still under construction, for reporting that warp gates were not auto-exploding in the absence of a friendly command station, for reporting that AI engineers sometimes teleport back and forth between various spots in an enemy system for no apparent reason, for reporting a problem causing human player ships in FRD mode to do nothing because they were constantly picking a teleporting target and dropping it again, for reporting a rare galaxy map planetary summary tex wrapping oddity, and that sometimes the game deselected the Star buy category on starship constructors.

-Thanks to Iskabis for reporting that translocators were affecting forcefields, rendering them much less useful than they should be.

-Thanks to dumpsterKEEPER for reporting a typo in the Interplanetary Munitions Booster description.

-Thanks to MaxAstro for suggesting that engineers be immune to dark matter, for suggesting a control node to make engineers prefer to assist non-mobile-military ships, and for reporting that Marauder Buzz Bombs were not damaging player ships, for reporting the issue with self-building manufactories incorrectly being auto-managed.

-Thanks to Dmdunn for reporting that it was sometimes possible to tell that a fully cloaked enemy ship was present by mousing over the location and for pointing out the oddness of a smaller forcefield completely within another forcefield being damaged before the outer forcefield.

-Thanks to Minty for reporting that using the middle-mouse-button scroll feature while in ship placement mode would make the screen jump in an unhelpful manner.

-Thanks to Simoyd for reporting that cursor position detection was still off in some cases for some players when the window was not based at screen coordinate 0,0.

-Thanks to triggerman602 for reporting that impulse reaction emitters were doing improbable amounts of damage against golems and for reporting that Riot Control Starships with un-buildable build queue items were incorrectly attracting engineer assistance (which would then fail).

-Thanks to corfe83 for suggesting that Galaxy View find mode account for ships in transports.

-Thanks to quickstix for reporting that if Icon Grouping was enabled and multiple constructors with rally points were selected, only the rally point of the "top" constructor would be drawn, for pointing out that the planetary shield booster description was somewhat ambiguous, for reporting that autosaves were saving as "Autosave_".

-Thanks to fbgbt for reporting that engineers were not reporting their outflows on the expenses-by-player stats screen in some cases.

-Thanks to vnena for reporting that AI ships in tutorial 3 were sometimes attacking the human player when the instructions specifically state that this would not happen.

-Thanks to Lyrae for pointing out that the economy tutorial was confusing with the new auto-build-harvester behavior.

-Thanks to zebramatt for pointing out that the "Remains Rebuilders" unit was inconsistently using the plural form for it's main name.

-Thanks to vince0018 for providing improved versions of the sound effects for ShotTiny and ShotTinyRapid.

-Thanks to lazerwolf for suggesting the improvement to the descriptions of manufactories.

-Thanks to WraithOD for reporting the sticky-scrolling-key problem with the scores screen.

-Thanks to Shardz for (repeatedly) suggesting an in-game screenshot key.

-Thanks to Tssbackus for reporting that FRD ships were just sitting there doing nothing when there were tons of ships fighting at once (mostly just after loading a game).

-Thanks to Nightchill for suggesting that Devourer Golems have more health.

-Thanks to Drutt-Myth for reporting the crash with raid engines on non-controlled planets.

-Thanks to KaOSoFt and dlcooper for reporting the issue with the tutorial window text being cut off.

-Thanks to Ruges and orzelek for reporting that planetary shield boosters and radar jammers could not be scrapped.